2019 election is referendum on Trudeau’s leadership

"Yes, this election is looking like a referendum on Justin Trudeau’s leadership. Gone are the illusions of 2015 that Trudeau would jettison the arrogance and self-righteousness that have always been the single most distinguishing trait of the Liberal Party of Canada."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Andrea Kaiser, Federal Liberal Candidate for the Riding of Niagara Falls, paid a visit to Silks Country Kitchen in Niagara-on-the-Lake and chatted with diners during a brief stop Wednesday morning, August 14, 2019. Julie Jocsak/ Torstar

I’m not sure who was watching last night’s leaders’ debate but here’s who I think won: Justin Trudeau.

Sitting through two hours of a leaders’ debate is probably cruel and unusual punishment for anybody except the nerdiest of political nerds but why in the world hold a debate a day after the campaign officially began and parties have only just started trotting out their pie-in-the-sky election promises?

Only Maclean’s knows for sure.

I’m not defending Trudeau’s decision to be a no-show but I sort of get why he decided to skip the debate last night. He’ll be there for the two semi-official debates in early October and the added French debate on TVA. They’ll be held at a point in the campaign when the public is actually paying some attention to it all and it risks being relevant. Yesterday was always going to be just practice for the participants.

By skipping the debate, Trudeau let the others duke it out and though they tried to gang up on the Liberal prime minister, they managed mainly to talk over each other in their effort to play to their bases and distinguish themselves from one another.

They all did a reasonably good job but did any of them look and act particularly prime ministerial? Not really.

Andrew Scheer has learned his lines but you always get the impression he doesn’t really master those unexpected followup questions very well. And I can’t overcome the image of him as prime minister of a model Parliament as a senior in high school. His line about the cost of living being less affordable because Justin Trudeau has raised taxes is a good populist pitch but he’s telling porkies when he speaks about Ottawa racking up “massive deficits as far as the eye can see.”

Yes, Canada is running deficits but they’re pretty small by any international measure, so much so that Scheer himself would continue to run them for five more years.

Elizabeth May is naturally enough the most experienced debate performer of the lot but when you get her away from discussing climate change, you have to wonder whether she can be trusted running a country. Her proposal to offer federal jobs to hijab-wearing teachers who are victims of Quebec’s Bill 21 was downright weird, like letting SNC-Lavalin off corruption charges if they would only build water-treatment facilities in First-Nations communities.

Maybe the Greens would force SNC-Lavalin to hire those same Quebec teachers and give them jobs running the water treatment plants. Sounds like a plan.

Jagmeet Singh probably did the best of the three, judging from the low expectations around the NDP these days. Although he had way too many anecdotes about his encounters with struggling single moms on the election trail, he was true to his NDP roots, defending massive new social spending financed by higher taxes on the wealthy.

If any traditional New Democrats are watching, they should be relieved and not necessarily abandon the party. Ironically, a stronger NDP vying for votes may not be bad news for Trudeau. It means the Greens, who have been suffering from a spate of over-confidence in recent weeks, won’t necessarily hoover up all the anti-Trudeau votes.

Two weak third parties on the left is probably a lot better for Trudeau than one strong one that actually looks as if it could form a government or even an official opposition. And both May and Singh were aligned on one important issue in the debate — national pharmacare — which Trudeau will be glad to steal from both of them as an election promise.

Yes, this election is looking like a referendum on Justin Trudeau’s leadership. Gone are the illusions of 2015 that Trudeau would jettison the arrogance and self-righteousness that have always been the single most distinguishing trait of the Liberal Party of Canada.

His performance in the SNC-Lavalin affair was reprehensible but it looks as if the public has probably had enough of the issue and will move on, no matter how many followup articles appear in The Globe and Mail.

Yet Trudeau remains the best retail politician of the lot and the polls have been slowly moving in his direction. With the Conservatives wasting tons of votes with their massive leads in Alberta and Saskatchewan, their 34 per cent in public opinion polls is actually a lot smaller than it looks.

While the writs may have just been dropped, this still remains Justin Trudeau’s election to lose.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

More from iPolitics

X

Join the conversation. It gets feisty!

Author

Alan Freeman is an Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. He came to the U of O from the Department of Finance, where he served as assistant deputy minister of consultations and communications. Alan joined the public service in 2008 after a distinguished career in journalism as a parliamentary reporter and business journalist for The Canadian Press, The Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail. At the Globe, he spent more than 10 years as a foreign correspondent based in Berlin, London and Washington.